1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to computer systems and, more particularly, to metering utilization of computational resources by applications operating on computer systems.
2. Description of the Related Art
Many organizations rely on computer systems to provide services essential to their activities, such as email, office productivity and web-based services as well as more complex database and enterprise management services. In many cases, considerable expense is incurred in procuring and maintaining the hardware and software systems necessary to provide such services. However, such costs are often borne to a greater extent by the providers of computational services, rather than the consumers of such services. For example, within an organization, the costs of providing services may be budgeted to an information technology that may be the least active consumer of some of the provided services.
Requiring the service provider to shoulder the larger share of the cost of providing services has various disadvantages. Such a model may obscure the distinctions between resource consumers where significant distinctions in usage patterns may exist. Without a cost constraint on resource usage, consumers may be inclined to use resources indiscriminately. If the cost of such consumption is not related to the consumer in a direct way, such costs may not be fairly distributed. For example, if each organizational unit funds a common computer service infrastructure at a rate independent of service usage, such as a percentage of organizational unit revenue, then smaller service consumers may effectively subsidize larger ones.